Make Your Enemies Your Allies

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Executive Summary

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Rivalries in the workplace can be destructive to both personal career growth and group success. Many attempts to reverse rivalries fail because of the complex way emotion and reason operate in the building of trust. Using a method called the 3Rs, an effective leader can turn a rival into a collaborator, setting the stage for a healthy work life while driving fresh thinking within an organization. Step 1 of the method is redirection, shifting a rival’s negative emotions away from the adversarial relationship. This creates an opening for Step 2, reciprocity, through which a relationship can be established. Here, the essential principle is to give before you ask—offering a rival something of clear benefit and “priming the pump” for a future return that requires little effort on the rival’s part. Step 3, rationality, sets expectations of the new relationship so that efforts made using the previous steps don’t come off as disingenuous. A rival is encouraged to see collaborative opportunities from a reasoned standpoint. A key advantage of the 3Rs is that the method can work to reverse all kinds of rivalries, including those with subordinates, peers, and superiors.

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Many well-intentioned efforts to reverse rivalries fail in large part because of the complex way trust operates in these relationships. Research shows that trust is based on both reason and emotion. If the emotional orientation toward a person is negative—typically because of a perceived threat—then reason will be twisted to align with those negative feelings. This is why feuds can stalemate trust: New facts and arguments, no matter how credible and logical, may be seen as ploys to dupe the other side. This effect is not just psychological; it is physiological. When we experience negative emotions, blood recedes from the thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, and rushes to its oldest and most involuntary part, the “reptilian” stem, crippling the intake of new information.

Most executives who decide they want to reverse a rivalry will, quite understandably, turn to reason, presenting incentives for trustworthy collaboration. But in these situations, the “emotional brain” must be managed before adversaries can understand evidence and be persuaded.

When John Clendenin looked at Tom Gunning at Xerox, he immediately saw grounds for a strong partnership beyond a perfunctory subordinate-superior relationship. Gunning had 20 years’ worth of organizational and technical knowledge, and contacts around the company, but he lacked the leadership skills and vision that Clendenin possessed. Conversely, Clendenin understood management but needed Gunning’s expertise and connections to successfully navigate his new company. Unfortunately, Gunning’s emotions were getting in the way. Clendenin needed to employ the 3Rs.

Redirection

Step 1 is to redirect your rival’s negative emotions so that they are channeled away from you. Clendenin decided to have a one-on-one meeting with Gunning, but not in his office, because that would only remind Gunning of the promotion he’d lost. Instead, he found out where Gunning liked to eat and took him there for lunch. “I was letting him know that I understood his worth,” Clendenin says of this contextual redirection.

He followed this with a plain statement of redirection, telling Gunning that a third entity beyond the control of both men was the root cause of their situation. “I didn’t put you in this position,” Clendenin said. “Xerox put us both in this position.”

Many executives scoff when they first hear this story, believing Clendenin’s actions to be too transparent. But redirection doesn’t have to be hidden. With stage magic, for example, audience members understand that redirection is happening, but that doesn’t lessen their acceptance or spoil the payoff of the technique. Other personal interactions work similarly. For instance, we accept flattery even if we recognize it as such.

Another common redirection tactic is to introduce a discussion of things you and your rival have in common, or casually portray a source of tension—a particular initiative, employee, or event—in a more favorable light. It sounds obvious. But redirection will shift negative emotions away from you and lay the groundwork for Step 2: reciprocity.

Reciprocity

The essential principle here is to give before you ask. Undoing a negative tie begins with giving up something of value rather than asking for a “fair trade.” If you give and then ask for something right away in return, you don’t establish a relationship; you carry out a transaction.

When done correctly, reciprocity is like priming the pump. In the old days, pumps required lots of exertion to produce any water. You had to repeatedly work a lever to eliminate a vacuum in the line before water could flow. But if you poured a small bucket of water into the line first, the vacuum was quickly eliminated, enabling the water to flow with less effort. Reciprocity with a rival works in much the same way.

Reflect carefully on what you should give and, ideally, choose something that requires little effort from the other party to reciprocate. Clendenin moved from redirection to reciprocity at the lunch by promising to support Gunning’s leadership development and future advancement at Xerox. But, recognizing that mere promises of future returns wouldn’t be enough to spark collaboration, he also offered Gunning something concrete: the chance to attend executive-level meetings. This was of immediate value, not a distant, murky benefit. Gunning could gain visibility, credibility, and connections.

The arrangement also ensured reciprocity. Gunning’s presence at the meetings furnished Clendenin with on-hand technical expertise and organizational knowledge while giving him “reputation points” with Gunning’s contacts. Thus, his offer created the purest form of reciprocity; if Gunning attended the meetings, Clendenin would never have to explicitly request a quid pro quo.

Reciprocity involves considering ways that you can immediately fulfill a rival’s need or reduce a pain point. Live up to your end of the bargain first, but figure out a way to ensure a return from your rival without the person’s feeling that pressure. Another example comes from Brian’s colleague Adam Galinsky, who advises leaders in contentious restructurings and business closings to generate goodwill among outgoing employees by offering professional references or placements at other companies as long as the employees continue to meet or exceed expectations until their office closes. The employees see immediate value, and although they don’t consciously pay back the organization, the firm nonetheless benefits by maintaining continuity in its workforce until the scheduled closure.

Similarly, a colleague who helps an adversary complete a project, or a subordinate who stays overtime to finish a task for a difficult boss, not only helps that individual but can reap rewards when other teammates or superiors benefit from that effort, too. Here the judicious giving before asking sets a foundation for reciprocity with third parties, whose buy-in can positively assist in reshaping the adversarial relationship. (See the sidebar “Rivalries Don’t Exist in a Vacuum.”)

Rivalries Don’t Exist in a Vacuum

Even when a leader executes the 3Rs flawlessly to end a rivalry, his work isn’t necessarily done.

That’s because the relationship is often about more than just the two individuals. We all know people who seek to play to their advantage antagonism between others; some third parties might even view a blossoming partnership with trepidation or envy, triggering new negative emotions and rivalries.

You can head off this problem, as Clendenin did, by framing your work as beneficial not just to you and your adversary but to the whole organization, which makes the reversal of rivalry in everyone’s interest. When Clendenin brought Gunning into those executive-level meetings, he made it clear that Gunning was going to be a “poster child” for a new age at Xerox, in which talented, long-term employees could find new paths to leadership in a time of corporate transition. Even if the conflictmongers didn’t care about Clendenin’s and Gunning’s success, it would be far more difficult for them to sabotage an effort that was obviously good for the company.

Rationality

Step 3, rationality, establishes the expectations of the fledgling relationship you’ve built using the previous steps so that your efforts don’t come off as dishonest or as ineffective pandering. What would have happened if Clendenin had left the lunch without explaining how he wanted to work with Gunning going forward? Gunning might have begun to second-guess his new boss’s intentions and resumed his adversarial stance. If a rival is worried about the other shoe’s dropping, his emotional unease can undermine the trust you’ve built.

To employ rationality, Clendenin told Gunning that he needed him, or someone like him, to reach his goals at Xerox. This made it clear that he saw Gunning as a valuable, but not indispensable, partner. Another, softer approach might have involved Clendenin’s giving Gunning “the right of first refusal” to collaborate with him, making the offer seem special while judiciously indicating that there were others who could step in. Just to be clear, Clendenin was not asking Gunning for a specific favor in exchange for the one he’d granted in Step 2. He was simply saying that he wanted him to become an ally.

Clendenin also reinforced the connection between the three steps by making his offer time-limited, which raised the perception of the value of the deal without changing its content. He told Gunning he needed an answer before they left the restaurant. “I needed to nip this in the bud,” Clendenin recalls. “He knew I didn’t care if we sat in that restaurant until midnight if we had to.”

When rationality follows redirection and reciprocity, it should push your adversary into considering the situation from a reasoned standpoint, fully comprehending the expectations and benefits, and recognizing that he is looking at a valued opportunity that could be lost. Most people are highly motivated to avoid a loss, which complements their desire to gain something. Rationality is like offering medicine after a spoonful of sugar: It ensures that you’re getting the benefit of the shifted negative emotions, and any growing positive ones, which would otherwise diffuse over time. And it avoids the ambiguity that clouds expectations and feedback when flattery and favors come one day, and demands the next.

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Of course, Clendenin and Gunning did not walk out of the restaurant as full-blown collaborators. But both accepted that they should give each other the benefit of the doubt. Over the following weeks, this new mind-set allowed them to work as allies, a process that deepened trust and resource-sharing in a self-reinforcing cycle. So a potentially debilitating rivalry was transformed into a healthy working relationship and, in time, a strong partnership. Several years later, when Clendenin moved to another Xerox unit, he nominated Gunning as his replacement—and Gunning excelled in the position. The foundation for that remarkable shift had been established during the span of a single lunch.

Adapting the 3Rs

A key advantage of the 3Rs is that the method can work to reverse all kinds of rivalries, including those with a peer or a superior. Later in Clendenin’s tenure at Xerox, he noticed an inefficiency in the company’s inventory systems. At the time, Xerox was made up of semiautonomous international units that stockpiled excess inventory to avoid shortages. Clendenin proposed that the units instead share their inventories through an intrafirm network that would improve resource use and lower carrying costs for the company as a whole. Although the idea was objectively good for Xerox, it threatened the power of some unit vice presidents, so when Clendenin floated his idea, they shot it down.

What If the 3Rs Fail?

The 3Rs are effective, but they aren’t a guarantee. What should you do if the strategy isn’t working?

Strive for collaboration indirectly—

for example, by working well with a third party whom your rival trusts. A common ally can highlight to him the benefits of working with you.

Remember that timing matters.

People in power need a reason to interact. This was certainly the case with John Clendenin’s inventory-management pitch to the Xerox VPs: At first rebuffed, he was able to refloat his idea when the CEO called for a new strategy.

Recognize when to look elsewhere.

Sometimes the effort needed to reverse a rivalry is so great, and the returns so low, for you and your company that you’re better off deploying the same resources in another relationship.

A short time later, however, following an unexpected announcement by the CEO that the company needed better asset management, Clendenin found a way to reintroduce his proposal to the VPs. Because he knew they viewed him as an unwelcome challenger—or rival—he used the 3Rs.

His first move was to redirect their negative emotions away from him by planning a lunch for them at the regional office and serving them himself. This showed deference. He also presented himself not as an individual pushing a proposal but as someone who could expedite organizational change, shifting the reference point of his rivals’ tension. “With all of those egos and personalities, I never said, ‘This is my idea,’” Clendenin recalls. “I always said ‘we.’”

Applying the reciprocity principle of give before you ask, he requested nothing from them at the meeting. Instead, he facilitated a discussion about the CEO-led initiative. Inventory management was, unsurprisingly, a problem cited by many of the VPs, and Clendenin’s facilitation brought that to light. He then took on the luster of the person who had illuminated a generic problem, rather than someone who wanted to lessen the VPs’ autonomy.

That allowed him to present the rationality of his original idea. All of a sudden, it looked like an opportunity, rather than a threat, to the formerly antagonistic group. Clendenin indicated that he would be willing to coordinate a new system more cheaply than anyone else in the market could offer, while also noting that he might not have time to do so in the future, which raised the perceived value of his offer. The VPs agreed to execute the plan in stages and put Clendenin in charge. The initiative grew in small but steady steps, eventually saving Xerox millions. Equally important, Clendenin’s embrace by his rivals positioned him as a broker in the company and burnished his reputation as an institution builder.

John Clendenin understood that rivalries help no one; indeed, success often depends on not just neutralizing your foes but turning them into collaborators. By using the 3Rs to build trust in his network, Clendenin made sure everyone in his network thrived—including himself, Gunning, their team, the VPs, and Xerox—forming the basis for long-term ties and shared success. Years later, Clendenin started his own international logistics company. His partner in this new endeavor was his old rival, Tom Gunning, and the lead investors were none other than the unit VPs from Xerox who had once shot down his ideas. The authors’ research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (OCI-0838564—VOSS) and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (W911NF-09-2-0053).

A version of this article appeared in the May 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Brian Uzzi is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and the codirector of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO).

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